Saving Development: Secular NGOs, the Pentecostal Revolution and the Search for a Purified Political Space in the Taita Hills, Kenya

Abstract

This chapter examines semiotic and social-political overlaps and differences between Pentecostalism and non-governmental organisa-tions (NGOs) in neoliberal Kenya, focusing on the Taita Hills of southeastern Kenya in the 1990s. I make broad comparisons between NGOs and Pentecostal churches because they each have come to fill the vacuum left behind by a retreating state in the post-structural adjust-ment, 'neoliberal' era, and they often share much in common with each other. For example, both Pentecostalism and most NGOs aim to reform individual habits and dispositions, usually with a view to mak-ing people better citizens and accessing new sources of wealth. After a discussion of the religious history of development discourse and prac-tice in Taita, I examine how NGOs and Pentecostal churches intervened in the structural transformations affecting Kenya and Taita in the 1990s, seeking to create a new social situation and a new kind of human being through the erasure of the past and the disciplining of subjects. I dis-cuss how the methods and concepts employed by NGOs and Pentecostal churches overlap, and argue that they tend to diverge in their attitude towards people, concepts and institutions that are locally associated with the past, especially the autochthonous past. Despite the efforts of Pentecostal churches and NGOs to ground reality in something fixed and unassailable (whether the Divine or civic democracy), their prolif-eration in a competitive market also contributed to a local perception of undomesticated danger that was acted on in religious terms. In the final section of this chapter, I focus on an example of how, in practice, NGOs 134 D. Freeman (ed.), Pentecostalism and Development © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012